Much Ado About Numbers

September 2, 2024
In this entertaining history, Eastaway (What Is a Googly?)—director of Maths Inspiration, an organization aimed at getting teens interested in the subject—uses William Shakespeare’s plays as a springboard to explore Elizabethan science and mathematics. Highlighting how the Bard of Avon played with numbers, Eastaway notes that in Othello, Bianca underscores the length of her lover Cassio’s absence by describing a week as “eight score eight hours,” and that The Merchant of Venice’s Portia describes a payment of 36,000 ducats as “double six thousand and then treble that.” However, Eastaway is primarily concerned with the advances that were taking place outside the Globe Theater, discussing, for instance, how the 16th-century introduction of Arabic numerals to England made trading more efficient because the numerals were more easily manipulated than their Roman counterparts. Elsewhere, Eastaway describes how mathematician Edward Wright developed one of the first English maps accurate enough to sail by in 1599, and how Galileo outlined basic probability theory while explaining the popular dice game hazard in 1620. The connections to Shakespeare are often tangential (Wright’s map receives an oblique shout-out in Twelfth Night, for instance), but Eastaway nonetheless succeeds in outlining the mathematical and scientific ideas that trickled into the Bard’s plays. This idiosyncratic study will help readers better understand the world that shaped Shakespeare’s writings.